It’s a State of War Whose Time Has Come

For once I agree with Newt Gingrich. When asked by one of those insipid reporters who are intellectually incapable of shifting gears whether the cruise missile attack on terrorist training camps was a scenario out of the movie “Wag the Dog,” he replied, “That’s sick.”

The evidence of Osama bin Laden’s link to the embassy bombing was compelling enough to silence potential congressional critics once they had been briefed. Most alarming were the intelligence intercepts and other data pointing to imminent additional attacks. And intelligence sources now confirm that they have physical evidence that chemicals required for VX nerve gas weapons but not needed for medicines were being produced in the Sudanese plant originally financed by Bin Laden.

One did not need the top-secret briefings provided House Majority Leader Gingrich and others to know that the president of the United States did not order our embassies bombed or to realize that the missile attack was an appropriate response to the carnage. If our modern and very expensive weapons cannot be used against terrorists, what good are they in this post-Cold War world?

Indeed, we have an obligation to eliminate the terrorist camps in Afghanistan, since U.S. intelligence agencies built them in the first place. Our CIA actively recruited militants from throughout the Muslim world to fight a holy war against the Soviets that we supported with more than $6 billion in weapons, which are now in the hands of those who vow to destroy us.

The same Osama bin Laden who is now the leader of terrorist attacks on the U.S. was himself trained by the CIA and was a prominent leader of the foreigners who came to fight in Afghanistan. He is a monster of our creation, as is the government now in power in Kabul that sponsors him. The U.S.-backed victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan resulted in a cesspool of violence in which the most maddened elements proved victorious. The see-saw battles between competing bands of fanatics for control of Afghanistan that followed the Soviet defeat continues to terrorize the population in unspeakable ways.

Afghanistan is not now a governed nation in any coherent sense of the term. The civil war continues, but the country is largely ruled by a gang of zealots, the Taliban, who have expropriated Islam as a cover for an onslaught against the most fundamental human rights of their own people. Men are imprisoned for refusing to grow beards, watching television or flying kites, and women for attempting to work as nurses in a hospital, for attending school or for not covering all but their eyes. The legitimacy of the government is denied not only by the inhumane treatment of its own people but more to the point, by its avowed purpose to use the Bin Ladens of this world to wage war against other nations, beginning with our own.

Terrorism is not endemic to Islam. The recent bombing in Ireland is yet another instance of Christians killing one another in the name of their common God. A Jewish fanatic killed Israeli Prime Minister Yithzak Rabin and another gunned down innocent Muslims at prayer in a mosque. And the case of Theodore Kaczynski is a reminder that secular nuts can also wreak havoc. Fanaticism is a manifestation of rage rather than divine inspiration, and it was important that President Clinton stated clearly that terrorism is as incompatible with Islam as it is with the mainstream practice of all great religions. Devout followers of the prophet Mohammed are more often than not the victims of terrorism. For example, it was Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak who was marked for execution by the same Bin Laden whom the U.S. holds responsible for the recent embassy bombings.

But it would be naive in the extreme to deny that a violent variant of Islamic fundamentalism now threatens the world in ways that are unique, pervasive and intractable. Or that the U.S. is the prime target of that rage, not only for its justifiable support of Israel, but more important because this nation stands as the symbol of modernization in all of its good and bad components.

The result is a state of war that is as dangerous as it is undefined, ever elusively flowing across borders and mocking a politics based on the sanctity of the nation state. This does not grant our government carte blanche to blast million-dollar cruise missiles into sovereign nations in pursuit of terrorists; obviously, this is a response of last resort when all other means have failed. But when those claiming to rule a nation brazenly proclaim that they provide a base for terrorism, they invite retaliation.